Starting from scratch with no computer or computer building experience. Is there an off the shelf desktop that would work decent for ETH mining or would you still research and build one?
if you don't get computer building experience i think the best choice is a buy some Miner machine rather than build your own rig
I disagree, I didn't have a lot of computer building experience and I have successfully built two rigs now, one AMD based and one Nvidia based. Take your time, read a lot of information, and watch YouTube videos. There is a lot of good information to be found on both general computer building and mining rig builds.